


Old Friends

by ShunRenDan



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: AU, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Vaguely dark, noctis hates pie, noctis is sick, non-canon, prompto doesn't, prompto isn't
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 08:49:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28650816
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShunRenDan/pseuds/ShunRenDan
Summary: “Alright,” Prompto announced, pulling out two, intricately packaged plastic forks. “You’re going to have to put up with my sweet tooth today, but it’s gonna be worth it. Pie’s, like, a super food.”“Right,” Noctis affirmed. “And we’ll eat it with a fork?”“If you don’t wanna pick a fight, you will."
Relationships: Prompto Argentum & Noctis Lucis Caelum, Prompto Argentum/Noctis Lucis Caelum
Comments: 4
Kudos: 37





	Old Friends

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes, I want to run away to find good times again.

Noctis didn’t remember the big things about his diagnosis. He didn’t remember how much longer he was supposed to live or the name of the disease until he saw it printed in prim ink across the top of a page. He didn’t remember the exact words that turned his life upside down, either. What he remembered was the spackling on the walls, the imperfections in the paint there, and the way his heart sank through his gut like a skipping stone. He remembered the exact time on the clock, nine fifteen a.m., and he remembered the look on the doctor’s face as he delivered the news.

It was the little things that stuck in his mind like the spackling did that wall. The memories of that day were flotsam and jetsam in the sea of his greater feeling, and he was still adrift by the time he returned to his apartment later that night.

The night was no more memorable than the ride home. Hours passed on the couch. On the ledge of his bed. On the balcony, where the city stretched for miles beneath him and car lights turned into bug bites from heights immeasurable. He lived on the seventeenth floor, and their lives were indiscernible from that distance. They were static to him, just like the cool night breeze and the honk of far-off car horns.

When the morning came for him, he wished that he could have understood the reason he felt so blank. There was no pain, no sorrow. There was only a certain apathy sprinkled over the things he used to love from then out, and it carpeted all of his usual haunts — covering its bases, maybe — until he realized that there wasn’t much point to going out in the first place.

Coffee kept him awake on the nights when he couldn’t bear to sleep. Cup-noodle fortresses built up in the space around his desk, and old shirts littered his floor like grasses did the prairies far outside of the city. His kitchen was kept clean enough, and his living room wasn’t too bad. The worst of it was in his bedroom, where he holed himself up on the bad days, unwilling to venture far into the open.

The convenience store around the corner was a godsend.

So was Prompto.

It was like he had a sixth sense tucked away in that ditzy head of his. Whenever things felt too bad, he’d inevitably appear, like some kind of goddamn superhero— sometimes with a steaming bag of rice and chicken, other times with some microwave goodies that they could heat up. Noctis’s favorite was the brick oven pizzas, the kind he admittedly could have bought and baked himself, but… 

There was something nice about sharing the process with a friend. Together, they’d pull up some chairs and relax in front of the faux-stonework oven in his wall, watch the dough rise, and chit-chat about anything and everything that possibly came to mind. Some of the topics were dumb, others perfect, and most perfectly dumb. The best thing, though, was that Prompto didn’t treat him any differently after finding out about it.

On the day Noctis told Prompto, he thought that… that there must’ve been some mistake, and that Prompto just hadn’t heard him. It was like he was ready for it, and that sort of stability was something to be appreciated. Even Gladio made some comments about it, and Ignis’s winces whenever he heard a “someday” were almost famous. Prompto, by virtue of comparison, just didn’t seem all that affected.

He preferred to show how much he cared through actions, not words, and that was the thing that Noctis appreciated the most. He didn’t care about condolences or well-wishes that wouldn’t change anything. He cared about eating fried rice and arguing about whether or not Chainsaw Zombies 6 warranted a second viewing after the horrible endings of its predecessors.

To Noctis, it was a step down for an already declining franchise, but Prompto disagreed vehemently from the other side of the couch.

“Dude, you’re crazy,” he mumbled. “They let you out of the asylum like that?”

“You’re one to talk. You thought the third one was the best movie you’d ever seen.”

“Look, all I’m saying is that it holds up. You could watch that movie again right now and be just as unimpressed as the first time you saw it.”

“I shouldn’t have to gauge a movie’s success by whether or not I didn’t hate it,” Noctis fired back, lifting his chopsticks to his lips. He stuffed his cheeks and chewed through a mouth full of rice before continuing. “Look. You’re not a film critic. Look at you. You’re eating rice with a fork.”

“Not all of us can be cultured, mister Prince,” Prompto said, nose wrinkling.

“It’s not culture to eat food the way it’s meant to be eaten.”

“What, so you’re just too good for a fork?”

“Yeah.”

Prompto laughed so hard that he choked, and Noctis shook his head from the other side of the couch, sidling just a little bit closer and crossing both legs over the cushion. Really, Prompto was an uncultured heathen, and he knew Ignis would have backed him up on that, but Noctis wasn’t gonna bring that up. Even if Prompto was the type of horrible savage who ate rice with a fork, he was still the greatest guy Noctis knew.

Plus, it was sort of cute to see him fumble around with things, as if he weren’t the picture perfect image of a dumb blond brought straight out of the pages of a bad-jokes book. He sometimes took three tries to tie his shoes, he couldn’t run a mile without complaining, and most days his hair was an absolute mess.

But somehow, Noctis loved all that. It contributed to his normalcy, and those inadequacies were just idiosyncrasies to him.

“You’re wild, Noct,” Prompto concluded, settling in on the cushion beside him.

On the television, a soap opera drama neither of them cared about continued to play out as a blur of color. Strelitzia’s dead body had just been found, and none of them had yet found her killer — the sweet, innocent Ventus — despite the fact that he lurked among them. In the real world, night fell as the hours passed. The two of them split the time bantering back and forth, sometimes arguing for real, sometimes not, until eventually the time came for Prompto to head back home.

Noctis watched him go, a little disappointed, and felt rewarded when he returned the next day with what looked to be an entire stack of pies. Despite his surprise, Noctis deigned to let him and that sunshine smile of his through the door, rolling his eyes on the way to the counter.

“Alright,” Prompto announced, pulling out two, intricately packaged plastic forks. “You’re going to have to put up with my sweet tooth today, but it’s gonna be worth it. Pie’s, like, a super food.”

“Right,” Noctis affirmed. “And we’ll eat it with a fork?”

“If you don’t wanna pick a fight, you will— woah, hang on, do you think you’re supposed to eat pie with a spoon?”

“Well, yeah.”

The two of them looked at each other for a long second, both leaning over the counter, hands just inches apart. Prompto looked genuinely wounded. Noctis debated apologizing, but didn’t have the time before Prompto shook his head and gestured to the pies that were now spread out over the countertop.

“Look, your horrible decision making aside, we’re still trying these pies. I got pumpkin, chocolate cream, banana cream, blueberry, even apple. That’s, like, the holy quadrinity of classic pies.”

“I’m not a pie guy,” Noctis decided, shrugging. “And that’s five pies, not four.”

“What the hell do you mean you’re not a pie guy?”

“I don’t eat pie. I’ve never eaten pie.”

“Well, you’re gonna — look, you’re gonna eat this pie, or I’m gonna eat this pie, but nobody’s leaving this apartment until all of this pie is gone.”

And so Prompto angrily ate four pies, chomping down bite after bite until it looked like he was about to explode. Noctis sat across from him at the kitchen table and watched him every step of the way, mildly impressed. He wasn’t paying much attention to the technique, but sometimes it was hard not to stare at Prompto, even when he did really mundane things. The curvature of his jaw was something Noctis couldn’t get over, and the freckles splattered across his face like mud over a windshield…

Then there was the hair, that sunny blond hair that curled around his face like a thorny halo. It was difficult not to admire him, sometimes, even when his lips were dotted by pie crumbs and little bits of preserve left over from the apple pie. According to him, apple pie was his third favorite, though, so really it had no place there, and so Noctis had to stop himself from reaching over to smooth it off of his lip.

His friend was an I-eat-pie-with-a-fork level dumbass, and so he wasn’t gonna let him off the hook for that. No, he would let Prompto leave that night with a little bit of pie on his lips, and then he would need to explain that he’d been eating pie with a fork, and then his friends would totally look at him like he was a weirdo.

At least, that was what he thought he’d do, until he saw Prompto pull out the final, most deadly pie of all: pumpkin.

“Prompto,” Noctis grunted, resting his cheek on his fist. “You’re allergic to pumpkins. You cannot eat that pie.”

“What, is that, like, an order?”

“You’re allergic.”

“Yeah, well, you eat pie with a spoon.”

Noctis snorted.

“The right way, you mean.”

“Look, all I’m saying is that if the press knew you ate pie with a spoon, there wouldn’t be a place on this planet you could hide.”

“Oh, I’m so grateful you love me for the way I am,” Noctis laughed, rolling his eyes.

He hadn’t meant to say that word, the L-word, and he hadn’t meant to say it like that, jokingly, and for a second his world started to crash around his ears— but Prompto was laughing, and that wasn’t a rejection, he wasn’t denying that sentiment, and somehow that felt nice. The thought left a hum in his heart that he hadn’t realized would linger, and he considered, for the first time, whether or not he might have fallen in love with his best friend without realizing it.

Begrudging to a fault, Noctis took the pumpkin pie away from Prompto and scooted his chair so that they were right next to each other. Benevolent, he even took the fork from his friend’s outstretched hand and regarded it with a cruel sort of indifference.

For what he was about to do, he figured he must’ve.

Maybe Prompto was worth loving.

Eating pie with a fork for.

“You really won’t leave until this pie’s gone,” Noctis asked, not asking.

“Course not, buddy.”

“You’re going to make me eat this pie so that you won’t kill yourself eating it.”

“Well, I mean, not to be rude, but one of us is already dying, so—”

“That’s pretty rude.”

“Nah, I said ‘not to be rude,’ so it wasn’t.”

“You can’t ‘no homo’ a death joke on a dying guy.”

“What, why not?”

Noctis turned to Prompto, incredulous, barely holding back his laughter.

“You can’t ask that, either.”

“Well, what can I do?”

“Shut up and watch me eat this pie,” Noctis grumbled, shaking his head, dipping his fork into the little, brown flat of the pie’s face.

Prompto turned so that he was facing Noctis dead on, face screwed up with focus. For a second, the prince hesitated, totally unsettled by how intensely his best friend was staring at him over a literal forkful of pumpkin pie, and then he brought it to his lips. It tasted alright, was a bit crumbly, and he chewed it with more than a little apprehension. Pie was, apparently, like cheesecake… just not as good, but he wasn’t about to crush his friend’s dreams like that.

“It’s alright.”

“Just alright?”

Yeah, nevermind.

Noctis put on his dream-crushing shoes.

“I mean, it’s like cheesecake, but if cheesecake were shitty.”

“You’re shitty,” Prompto fired back.

“Shitty people don’t have pie all over their faces.”

“Yeah, that’s why you’re shitty. It’s like, all over your bottom lip, dude.”

Noctis brought a thumb to his lip, and then frowned.

“Are you fucking with me?”

“Vulgar,” Prompto whistled. “And no.”

Noctis tried to flick the pie off of his lips as regally as he could manage, but that just got Prompto laughing.

“No, man, you’re missing it super hard.”

“Then shut up and help me,” Noctis replied, face red.

Prompto leaned in without another thought, looking absolutely merciful, and brushed his thumb over Noctis’s lower lip. If he were red before, that simple gesture rendered him the court’s most royal tomato, and he was forced to swallow back the ball of apprehension in his throat. Prompto’s hand lingered against the side of his face in the meanwhile, thumb smoothing out over the ridge of the prince’s cheek.

When he didn’t pull it away, Noctis was forced to face the fact that his beautiful best friend was staring right at him. Only a few inches away, too, so they were painfully close, and he could feel just how warm Prompto was from the hand on his cheek and it would have been just so easy to—

“You’ve, uh, still got some more on ya,” Prompto whispered.

“Uh-huh.”

“Want me to help you get it off?”

Noctis inhaled.

“Oh, uhm, yeah.”

Smooth.

A dim light caught fire in Prompto’s eyes. Noctis’s gaze flickered back and forth, caught between a rock and a hard place — lip and sea. Then, in the next moment, it was all gone, replaced by the feeling of another mouth against his and the knowledge of just how soft Prompto’s hair actually was when it was in his hands. In another, they parted, faces separate, hands splayed once again over the table.

It took him a moment to regain his bearings. Figure out what was going on. He brought his index and middle finger to his bottom lip, wiped at the skin, and glanced, worriedly, to Prompto.

“Did I get it?”

“No,” Prompto laughed.

“I got it.”


End file.
